


scream hell towards heaven's door

by Hyb



Series: a home at the end of the world [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: 5x16, Alexandria Safe-Zone, Episode Tag, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-20 23:47:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3669564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/Hyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“These people. It's a family.” My family, Rick Grimes looked me in the eye and called me brother. [revised]</p>
            </blockquote>





	scream hell towards heaven's door

“It's bullshit,” Daryl says. 

First he's spoken since they filled their canteens in a frigid creek, before dawn burned off the dew. Aaron jolts in his skin, hand over his heart. Quirks a baffled brow and waits like he trusts Daryl to be going somewhere with this. Truth is, he needs anything but the imprint of gnawed entrails, of corn silk hair snagging on his knuckles.

“The picket fence crap,” Daryl shrugs, like it hasn't been itching at him for days. Gossip and playing house, however those small soft-bellied people pass the days like the world never ended. The world is living and dead, good and bad, nothing else. “If you'd been with our people-” He passes behind a tree to break the weight of Aaron's focus on his back. “Nobody would've cared.” Hitches a shoulder at all of Aaron: his ironed collar, soft voice, his long eyelashes, whatever shape the gay thing is supposed to be, everything that would've made Merle chew nails and spit bullets.

Daryl isn't used to talking so much; his mouth is dry. “These people. It's a family.” My family, Rick Grimes looked me in the eye and called me brother. “The rest don't matter none. You think I was worth two shits to anybody before, some redneck asshole never finished tenth grade?”

Aaron's quiet, lashes cast down like charcoal smudges. Pins him under a stare with no warning, eyes blue and open as a little kid, no guile, he's got no idea how Aaron survived even before the world ended.

“Rick trusts you.”

Daryl's throat knots.

“And you trust him.” Aaron always sounds too patient, even when he's getting punched in the face. “You don't have to sell me. I'm not worried about your people. Seeing you watch him, that's all I need to know.”

“There something you wanna say to me?” Daryl feels his face go tight and mean.

Aaron pauses with him, quiet among the dead leaves. His face is dappled in shadow, too fucking soft by a mile.

“All of you. The way all of you watch him.”

This, right here, ain't happening. Somebody's butchering people for the spite of it (or worse, there's a plan and Daryl doesn't see it, like a rabbit darting blind through a snare) they've got real problems out here, they're not going to hold hands and talk about their feelings, whatever the fuck Aaron _thinks_ he sees. Daryl jerks his head, spits, and Aaron is smart enough to shut up.

“Somebody came through here a while ago.” Daryl hitches the weight of his crossbow, rolls back into a vigilant march. A beat, and Aaron falls into step behind.

 

 

A gunshot shatters the air and Rick is limned in gold, dripping blood like he's been baptized.

Daryl can choose between scouring their surroundings until a chain of events emerges, follow the tracks, or he can keep Rick in his sights. Come down to it, it isn't a choice, it's not even a question.

All life is precious, or so Morgan said. 

Rick's flat stare sharpens. Tries to reach out, hitching his arm abortively, but the gun weighs down his hand. A muscle jumps in his bare and vulnerable cheek. 

Abraham held down the dead man, who looks almost familiar under the wreckage of his skull. Deanna gave the word, and Rick just pulled the trigger. There's nothing else Daryl needs to know, not now. He steps in to clutch Rick's elbow before he can stumble, numb and unsteady as he's looking. Twists, insistent, until he's turned Rick from the bodies, from Morgan's round shocked eyes and the red spill of brain flecked with bone. 

People are crying, hands clapped over their mouths. Jessie, he remembers. Daryl remembers who cut Rick's hair, who made him smile and slant his gaze off into the distance. Jessie and her fall of golden hair, her wet dark eyes overflowing.

“Morgan here got us out of a jam,” he murmurs low. Bears down on bone until Rick _sees_ him. “Everybody gonna catch up later, yeah?” Jerks his chin at the walker shrunken by the fire, a match for the acid stench clinging to Rick. 

The air shifts, Michonne and Carol flanking them like Valkyries. Rick holsters his gun. Blinks, jerks a nod, folds himself into a new shape, square shoulders and certainty.

“We run the walls,” Rick says, and they do.

 

 

Later, Daryl could have guessed it was midnight just seeking out the moon, but there are clocks here, seems like every house, every oven, every wristwatch is counting the minutes. 

Deanna was small, when he saw her again. Dirt on her knees, she'd tried to wipe her hands but the blood was sunk into the cuticles, the webbing of her knuckles. There was a body in a white sheet – her husband, Carol murmured low, and Daryl felt an uncomfortable twist because he didn't even know the man's name, couldn't remember one sleek smug face from all the rest. The blood had bloomed across the shroud, gone cold. A slice to the throat, he'd be turning, but Daryl crowded close and kept Rick from volunteering to put him down. These people had to learn.

Midnight, and his bolts are wet with gore, the handle of his knife skin warm. These people, they've eyed the bow like an affectation, some fucking quirk, they couldn't see but maybe now they do, maybe, and even if they choose to be blind he's ready at Rick's back.

Rick is still blood dark and reeking. Carl collides with him and holds on, holds fast, and Rick bends himself to it, curling over his son like a shield. Michonne flows through the doorway like ink, silent now as she was among the trees, moving shadow to shadow like some wild thing. So long as she still moves like that, so long as she _remembers_ , Daryl thinks this place might not kill them.

Three more straggling walkers they picked off within the gates, and Rick was rigid as a spear all the while. He hammered them down like the wrath of God but even Rick has to falter, sometimes. Daryl keeps him in sight. Keeps one eye on him until Rick vanishes behind a closed door with Morgan, and then he locks his jaw so hard it spasms tight up to his temple.

Day by day he's losing the scent of his family. Living in the woods, on the run, in the confines of the prison with their rainwater rations, people couldn't hide themselves. All sweat begins to smell the same, comforting, fading into a background note. Musk is what comes through, distinct as a fingerprint, like streaks of color on the air. He could find Rick or Carol in a black room, Michonne or Carl. Jude still honey sweet where her hair sweeps golden at the crown. He knew Beth, like salt on watermelon. Hershel. T-Dog. Lori, crisp as ivy. Shane's ozone tang. It was a fucking gift, all of it, to breathe in life.

Daryl has his own flavor of decomposition, catches hints of it in his clothes – moss, the rain damp hollows under dry leaves. He and Aaron made their own use of the wild leeks, lingering green under his fingernails. Sharp and pungent in this scrubbed place. Alexandria is all fresh paint, no scuffs, windows flung open to chase out the stale coffin air.

The walkers are only rot, putrid, they won't decay to dust and new life. Daryl can't count how many kills he's gutted, dinners skinned, and it's never the same. The dead are _wrong._

Carol is close and Daryl reels her even closer, a clumsy hold that rubs dirt and worse into her clean clothes. He can't find the scent of her, just soap on soap, wool and cotton bathed in chemicals when he hasn't smelled the like in two years. They'll be alright, he tells himself. They have to be, because he can feel the press of her knife beneath that ridiculous sweater. 

Noah is gone, and Daryl never learned him. Barely knew him, except finding him meant finding Beth, one fragile filament of mercy paid back in hope. A kid still young in the face, too kind, he could rob strangers but never fire a shot.

Death came for them tonight and they'll learn, you have to fight to live. 

 

 

Rick emerges at last. Hitches a shoulder and Daryl climbs the stairs in his shadow.

“I talked to Morgan.”

Daryl's silence says, you talked a long damn time. They pass into the bedroom, and Rick casts a glance behind. His mouth twists, a wince that ripples all the way up to the sun lines bracketing his eyes. 

“There was a lot to say.”

 

 

Daryl carried the image with him into the wild. Deanna anointing Rick constable at the gate, laying claim to him. Later in the twilight hush Rick swore they could take this place if their hands were forced. Sounded like the Rick he remembers from the road, Rick with his cool mistrust and vicious reflexes and still Daryl struggles to recognize him. Officer Friendly lives in Alexandria, wears a stranger's face with Rick's voice, his steady hands, his warm gun.

Turns out if you just scratch the surface of the beast the good cop is underneath, shiny as a new penny. Rick, the nape of his neck bare as Samson. The unguarded red flush of his mouth. Daryl was too strange looking by half when he was young, narrow cat skull and all. He drew some looks but he never had cocksucker lips like that, wet and inviting.

Steam fogs over the mirrors, the window, laps at Daryl's cuffs, collar. Sweat beads under the fringe of his hair. Rick slumps under the spray and Daryl keeps his head down, watches the water darken to rust and circle the drain. Waits. 

Clean, shuffling into clothes, from one moment to the next Rick glasses over, then snaps himself back into focus. Pauses to offer the shower stall, as if Daryl's ever partaken in that thoughtless locker room ease. Two years stripped Rick of whatever modesty he had, surely. Daryl is the one who averts his eyes.

They lie on their backs, elbow to elbow like brothers, sheets tucked beneath the mattress. Daryl can't even remember it, sleeping tangled up in layers like gift wrap for geeks. Daryl kicks his boots off, no more. Seems easier for Rick this way, talking to the ceiling. The proximity shouldn't prickle Daryl's skin. Shivering through their first winter they slept in closer quarters than this, back to back while Rick and Lori put a sea of silence between them, Carl drifting pale and anxious between. Rick would nap up in the guard tower, at the prison, pillow his cheek on his bicep and drift off in a pool of golden sunlight. No gun, brow streaked with sweat and dirt from fussing over the crops, he'd doze through the most sweltering hour of the afternoon with Daryl perched on lookout, surveying what kingdom they had to call their own. Like brothers, that's what this closeness means. 

This is what they know, hammering out the facts to one another.

Noah. Aiden. Pete. Jessie. Fists in a quiet house. A shattered window. The revolver. Trial. Stolen sword. Execution.

Daryl turns over the details until they fit into a whole, painting Rick wild and furious. Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders in his temple, that's what Daryl remembers from sermons worn thin in memory. Smashing the doves out of their cages, laying down the law like thunder. Ma was the only one who cared about church - it's been a long time, maybe he remembers wrong.

He trades his own truth. That letter carved in flesh like a brand, again and again. A trap, coldest he's seen since Terminus. Bodies butchered, skewered on hooks for bait. Aaron and his thickheaded fairness. Morgan like a mirage.

Never has shared his last venture. A horse gone wild, murdered by good intentions. Never said a word, but he doesn't think of it any less. Just today he looked death in its slavering maw. The moment comes back to him in flashes, echoes cold down to his bones. Daryl smoked what might have been his last cigarette; in the dry still caverns of his mind, winding deep into the blackness, he said his goodbyes. Wrapped Carol's hand firm around her knife. Hoisted Jude on his hip. Kissed Rick's eyes shut like he could stop him from grieving, from taking on the weight. Same as he carries Noah now, wears all their dead like chains.

“Was this the play?” Daryl asks the plaster.

Rick shakes his head, barely. “I wanted to kill him. Should have. Not like this.” Rick was right, but he'll still carry everybody else's load.

“What stopped you before?” Under the spray shallow lacerations opened fresh over Rick's clean skin, trailing now to soak his collar ruddy. Daryl wonders if they even know, how lucky one son of a bitch was to live even a day after laying hands on Rick Grimes. (But that was Rick outside, he murmurs in his dark corners, like a secret he's trying to keep from himself.)

“Michonne coldcocked me,” Rick rumbles, voice scraped toneless. “Screaming the truth doesn't much dispose people to listen.”

“If they didn't hear it's cause they didn't wanna,” Daryl scoffs. Stares at the closed door, the flimsy lock that must comfort some people, the ones who don't know fear. Listens to Rick breathe.

“You didn't take a gun,” Rick says at last, neutral. Daryl twists, narrows his eyes.

“Don't mean I'm not with you.”

Shane went down like a dog and he's had Rick's six ever since. Never been questioned before, it was Rick pleading with him when Daryl took off to watch out for his brother, Rick who let him back in. Maybe Rick smells it on him, here. Remembers that they aren't the same. Redneck hillbilly freak staining the manicured lawns.

Rick's entire body goes slack on a three octave exhale, head falling heavy to Daryl's shoulder. Breathes in, and out, washing over Daryl's neck. A beat, and his brows knit in consideration.

“Wild onion?” It's absent, nostalgic. “Smart.”

Daryl was the one to teach them all the trick of it. Rubbed Jude from chubby foot to fingertip until she was smudged green, kept the bloodsuckers off and the crying down. 

It's not a bad thought, Lil Asskicker pinwheeling kicks when they caught her somewhere ticklish. Glenn, chewing on a long stem when their bellies were tight, trying to foist his rations off on Maggie until she twisted his ear. Daryl drifts off, doesn't know when. Wakes and the ceiling is shading ghost gray before dawn. Rick lays heavy as a sack of cannonballs but his chest rises and falls in just the same cadence.

“Sleep any?” Daryl rubs his face, flesh stiff on his skull. 

“Not yet.” 

Not an excuse for what comes next, the way Rick sounds like ten miles of bad road, cracked open. This place is erasing everything, or trying to, but the trade was supposed to be for his family. Rick was supposed to be happy here.

Daryl skates his fingertips over Rick's sternum, the solemn drum of his heart, and the world doesn't end.

When he drags the heel of a hand down his belly Rick's eyes fall shut, chest hitching. The tight line of his shoulders eases. Daryl finally blinks, delves down inside a stranger's boxer shorts and cups Rick's soft cock. Wasn't supposed to happen like this, not now, not ever. A lot of things weren't supposed to happen.

He goes slow. Waits for a recoil that never comes. Licks the remnants of wild leeks from his palm again and again to ease the way as he gets him hard, up the shaft, thumb rubbing hot slick at the crown. He hooks one foot over Rick's shin to keep him still; Rick is panting open mouthed into Daryl's neck, eyelashes shivering over his pulse, and he doesn't fight it. Sighs when Daryl finally jacks him in earnest, hips hitching a bare inch from the mattress. His hands are lax, nowhere near the hot scald of Daryl's face or his dick throbbing murder against his fly. No, not quite – Rick's got a hold on his shirt, Daryl's belly twitching under the rub of his knuckles.

If Daryl turns an inch he can nose at Rick's curls, his shorn mane. Pleading for the scent of copper and sun warm brick, but it won't answer. 

Rick comes shuddering and soundless, lips parted, Daryl's thumb grinding into his slit. Boneless, exhausted and uncomplaining as he is now, Daryl imagines he could roll him onto his belly, fuck Rick open to those easy little gasps. 

Daryl licks his hand clean. Quick about it, no lingering, no chasing the bitter salt truth of Rick across his palm. Snags his boots from the floor, cinches the blinds tighter to ward off the sunrise. 

“Daryl?” Now Rick is blinking at him, muzzy and confused, a shadow with silver eyes fumbling to sit up on his elbows. 

“Don't worry on it. Get some sleep.” And he shuts the door on all the excuses. Didn't cost him a damn thing, to touch what he's watched for years. Doesn't matter any more than jerking himself off, and talking won't improve on it.

 

 

Morgan is sitting up on the front porch like he slept there even though it gets cold these nights, still dressed from the road. Daryl spies fur, the unmistakable hull of a bullet, a crinkling tin foil gleam, before it all disappears back into his pockets.

The saddest thing is seeing an outdoor cat thinking it's an indoor cat. Joe wasn't wrong, not about everything.

“You didn't know him, before.” Morgan says, and doesn't blink. Waits like they've been having this conversation for hours. Like Daryl needs to be told that Rick's not the same. Like Rick would be _alive_ if he hadn't changed.

“Didn't bring you here to be his goddamn conscience,” Daryl bites back. Lights up a bent cigarette and exchanges one lungful of coffin air for another. “You got any family left? Any people?” 

It's snake meanness, right there. Fucking rhetorical question if there ever was one. Nothing Rick hasn't told him before, the two of them tracking down supper, no audience but the trees and the dead - _that could have been me, that was almost me, chasing ghosts_. Daryl nods to himself, instead. 

“Rick does.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

_I'm dead now_  
_check my chest and you'll see_  
_the life has been mined from me_  
_burned for the heat_

_I'm dead now_  
_can you hear the relief_  
_as life's belligerent symphonies_  
_finally cease_

 

.

**Author's Note:**

> I told myself I would write crack AU's and nonsense for this ship, that is what I told myself. I don't know how this happened.
> 
> Title and excerpt from "Dead Now" by Frightened Rabbit.
> 
> Share your thoughts and concrit below, comments are gold and I need all the help I can get. You can find me on [tumblr](http://h-yb.tumblr.com/), or if you really want to wallow, check out my pathetic [Rick Grimes playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/1264475943/playlist/6SZr8hLRq1NbhFJF9hVw5d) on Spotify.


End file.
